-The new display is the whole enterprise here, and it works and works well. Soooo tasty.

-We've waited so long to increase pixel densities that apparently quadrupling is the way this is going to happen. The web will have to be redesigned to take advantage, but we're ready. A taste of TR in Retina-res: http://fredded.eu/tr/tr-hidpi.png

-Infinity Blade II says it's updated for the new display, but it's clearly not running at native res. Does look a little nicer than on the iPad 2, though, side by side. I've tweeted Mark Rein for an explanation of what it's doing (i.e., scaling or something)

-Remote desktop into my desktop PC with a 30" LCD is darn near to the native resolution on the new iPad. The text is really, really small, of course, but it works.

-Why didn't this happen in desktop displays first? Ugh. Shameful, really, although I get that making dense displays also large is hard.

adisor19 wrote:How's the weight compared to the iPad 2 ? How does it feel holding it ? Do you get tired quicker ?

Adi

It's still lighter than the original iPad although slightly heavier than the iPad2. It's not such an amazing difference where the problems of holding a tablet up for a long period time is magnified or removed.

That is, even an iPad2 is a tad to heavy to be comfortable to hold for hours even though it's really light.

JustAnEngineer wrote:If you paid as much per square inch for your desktop display as you paid for the latest iPad, who could afford it other than for medical imaging?

Dunno what percentage of the iPad BOM goes to the display. Maybe half? A little more?

Anyhow, the answers obviously are: Workstation users, designers who work with typography, professional photographers, CAD/CAM types, and the well off tech geeks of the world.

Heck, IBM used to make a killer LCD with very high density about five years ago. I saw one at a GeForce launch, perhaps G80? I think the thing cost like 30 grand. Was gorgeous, but Windows XP looked ridiculous on it, even with "large fonts." Was hoping high-DPI displays would take off from there and come down in price. Didn't really happen.

I know a lot of geeks have vision issues and don't see the need for high-DPI displays, but I am definitely not in that category. I'm willing to wager a majority of people will very much appreciate better displays, just like they did the move from dot matrix printers to lasers and ink jets back in the day. Happy to see the iPad democratizing these things. A lot of doubters will be converts after spending some time with one.

adisor19 wrote:How's the weight compared to the iPad 2 ? How does it feel holding it ? Do you get tired quicker ?

Adi

It's still lighter than the original iPad although slightly heavier than the iPad2. It's not such an amazing difference where the problems of holding a tablet up for a long period time is magnified or removed.

That is, even an iPad2 is a tad to heavy to be comfortable to hold for hours even though it's really light.

Yeah, first impressions are that it's really hard to tell the difference between the two in thickness or weight. However, the future ideal tablet will have to be lighter than either, especially for reading in bed.

I got mine yesterday and after spending a couple of hours with it, a little feedback concerning the screen:

- the screen is crazy sharp, incredible, the NYT page in portray looks like a magazine

- because the screen is so much sharper, my 24" 1920x1200 now looks a LOT worse than it did two days ago. I hope this is not going to be annoying in the long run.

- the PDF readers I use (iAnnotate and Goodreader) have not yet updated their rendering engines to the new resolution - this is true for other apps as well

Honestly, I can't wait for PC screens to go superhires, the additional sharpness is going to be such a boon for display workers and their poor eyes. I've looked at the inconsolata font I use for coding on the PC on the iPad 3 in the same size and, wow, this is going to be simply incredible.

yokem55 wrote:Scott, you saw the Asus TF700's display at CES didn't you? Can you say from memory how that unit's display compares to the new iPad's?

Going only by memory is a tricky thing. My sense is that they're both gorgeous, but it was easier to pick out individual pixels on the Asus. The pixel density is just higher on the iPad, with cripser detail in each letter of text. However, the iPad 3rd-gen's display has a bit of a yellowish cast to it, and I remember the colors of the Asus being pristine, with very white whites.

Also, I think the extra resolution was perhaps more of a help in Android, since its font scaling at more common pixel densities is kind of poor. You notice the improvement more because some of the kerning problems and such tend to go away at high DPI, whereas iOS doesn't have those issues at any resolution.

Overall, the iPad display is superior by virtue of sheer density, but the Asus a very nice bit of gear, too.

dashbarron wrote:Scott what about the reports I'm reading that the GPU won't be able to push the native resolution?

Those reports appear to be incorrect. The iPad 3 is just as snappy as the iPad 2 in general use (and that makes it faster than the average netbook for surfing the web, smoother than any Android tablet for touch input response--i.e., very good overall.)

That said, as I've noted, Infinity Blade II isn't running at a native 2048x1536, and I doubt it would run fast enough at the full three-megapixel resolution of the display. You can always push a GPU past its limits with enough pixels of sufficient quality, and IB2 has very high quality pixels. That's why Chair/Epic has apparently used some sort of image scaling.

For everyday use, though, the iPad 3 is golden. Given the number of times faster than the original iPad the A5X's GPU is (I'd guess ~5-14X, depending on the metric), the fact it can handle 4X the resolution shouldn't be a big shock.

spuppy wrote:Does the GPU have its own dedicated memory? Because the iPad 2 with 512 MB of RAM has barely enough for multitasking. I wonder if with 4x the resolution, 2x the RAM is enough?

iOS doesn't do true app-level multitasking, but it does backgrounding/task switching quite well on the iPad 2. RAM capacity has never felt like a constraint to me, at least, so I'm not sure where your assertion about the iPad 2's memory size is coming from. Given that, I'm not sure how to answer the second part of your question.

However, 1GB of shared memory does look to be plenty for a 3MP display. When the PC first moved to 2048x1536, the standard for video cards was 256MB of VRAM. See here:

We were running Doom 3 and Far Cry passably at 3MP with 256MB of VRAM.

There are a number of other iPad games that rival the Infinity Blade series for visual fidelity, including Dead Space, the Batman fighting game, and (from what I hear, though I haven't tried it) the Mass Effect 3 spin-off.

spuppy wrote:Does the GPU have its own dedicated memory? Because the iPad 2 with 512 MB of RAM has barely enough for multitasking. I wonder if with 4x the resolution, 2x the RAM is enough?

No, the GPU and CPU share the same memory pool.

I think attractive 3D games will struggle to run at the native resolution (Egypt ran fine, but it's an old and ugly engine compared to UE3), but 2D games or ones with simple graphics will look amazing.

Damage wrote:iOS doesn't do true app-level multitasking, but it does backgrounding/task switching quite well on the iPad 2. RAM capacity has never felt like a constraint to me, at least, so I'm not sure where your assertion about the iPad 2's memory size is coming from. Given that, I'm not sure how to answer the second part of your question.

Multitasking isn't really an issue even on the iPad 1. But a single app can end up using enough RAM that you can notice it. Open up enough tabs (and it's not even that many) in Safari and the iPad3 will show its chops.

In terms of 3D power, it's more than sufficient for a tablet. Native resolution will obviously be a problem for the highest end games but it's trivial to drop down a notch in resolution like all the current consoles do anyway.

Display is a whole new class, yet weight remains much the same. Precluding any further unexpected performance factors in graphics apps, is the new model therefore in a whole new league? Can we say, there was the iPad 1&2 era and it was great, but from here on it wouldn't be smart for users to put more time and money in older models than they already do?

In my experience, app switching is extremely laggy - moving from one app to another results in 3-5 seconds of lag where you are unable to do anything. And if you try, it just delays the lag longer. It makes the ipad 2 frustrating as a productivity device (and the ipad 1 was essentially useless). Whenever I find myself having to do anything other than goofing around with facebook or browsing web pages (1 at a time), it ends up being extremely frustrating. For instance just a few weeks ago I was on the road and a friend needed me to proofread a PDF presentation for them. Switching back and forth between the email app and ibooks was incredibly laggy, and made the task more cumbersome than using even the cheapest netbook would have been. Part of it was the OS' lack of multitasking, also I assume the low amount of RAM (1GB probably would have brute-forced the lag to go away) and part was the interface itself. Tablets are fun and intuitive for some things, but it's just not the right interface for actual work yet. Having an external keyboard with the ability to alt-tab would have made a world of difference, I'm sure. And this comes up a lot for me. Whenever I try to be productive with it, something like this just ruins the experience.

So all things being equal in terms of resolution, going from 512MB to 1GB would have made a significant impact in my opinion, but with 4x the res, I don't know if it will be a case of 'two steps forward, one step back'. I guess I'll have to wait and see for myself, or hear from people who (foolishly?) try to be productive with their ipads rather than just (smartly) use it the way Apple intends it to be used (though they do try to market it as a productivity device sometimes, which is funny to me).

trackerben wrote:Display is a whole new class, yet weight remains much the same. Precluding any further unexpected performance factors in graphics apps, is the new model therefore in a whole new league? Can we say, there was the iPad 1&2 era and it was great, but from here on it wouldn't be smart for users to put more time and money in older models than they already do?

You could say the screen is the ultimate for a 10" LCD screen in 4:3 format. I'm figuring that Android will likely settle for a somewhat close but not quite as high 1980x1200 in a 16:10 format. Going any higher in a tablet format would be losing too much for too little gain.

Processing power and battery efficiency still has room to improve though but I don't think there's any reason not to get the iPad3 if you're in the market for a high-end tablet.

So all things being equal in terms of resolution, going from 512MB to 1GB would have made a significant impact in my opinion, but with 4x the res, I don't know if it will be a case of 'two steps forward, one step back'. I guess I'll have to wait and see for myself, or hear from people who (foolishly?) try to be productive with their ipads rather than just (smartly) use it the way Apple intends it to be used (though they do try to market it as a productivity device sometimes, which is funny to me).

That was more the nature of iOS though and how it task-switches rather than multitasks. But iOS has latent multitasking capabilities right? I haven't gotten to try the iPad3 myself long enough to tell.

spuppy wrote:In my experience, app switching is extremely laggy - moving from one app to another results in 3-5 seconds of lag where you are unable to do anything. And if you try, it just delays the lag longer.

Honestly sounds to me like a very different experience than my iPad 2 has been. Perhaps other iPad 2 users can back me up here. App switching has always been pretty snappy for me, and the whole experience improved (especially web browsing, with multiple tabs) with the iOS 5 upgrade.

Makes me wonder if your iPad 2 didn't have a software or hardware issue of some sort. Was it running iOS 5? Had it been jailbroken? Any funny widgets or anything running? Rebooted recently? Hrmm.

Edit: Another possibility is that you were using older apps that weren't backgrounding-aware. If so, the app would launch itself again each time you switched to it. Could be the source of pain. Newer apps, man, just four-finger swipe left and right to move between them almost instantly.

ChronoReverse wrote:That was more the nature of iOS though and how it task-switches rather than multitasks. But iOS has latent multitasking capabilities right? I haven't gotten to try the iPad3 myself long enough to tell.

iOS allows certain processes to run in the background (VOIP, Audio, are a few I can think of) but halts most of the rest when you switch out of the app. The OS is quite capable of multitasking - it's based on OS X - but Apple limits user control of it to help battery life and eliminate any performance issues with the relatively underpowered mobile hardware of today.

ChronoReverse wrote:With that said, I can alt-tab with a single swipe on my Touchpad =D

PerfectCr wrote:The display on the iPad 3 is amazing. I love it. I could stare at it all day and reading on this thing is pure joy.

This. I'm a whore for display quality (you can pry my Dell 2405 FPW from my cold, dead hands) and the display on the iPad 3 is amazing. I'd pay serious money to have a screen like that on a real laptop.